Reach Out And Touch Me
by The Very Last Valkyrie
Summary: A surgical stew of C/O vignettes complete with hilarity, heartache, peach cobbler, sympathetic nervous systems and dynamite.
1. Kidulthood

_**Cristina's finest hour: **_**'Not _my_ shower!'  
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**Kidulthood**

I think maybe it was my mother's daughter who fell for Burke - or rather, the daughter who did everything in her power to rebel against her mother by becoming a world-class cardiothoracic surgeon and consistently refusing to wear pastels. It was his precision, his grace with a scalpel or pair of forceps; his grace in everything he did, in fact. I was his hand, and together we moved heaven and earth. I was his hand, but we were never a whole body.

Believe it or not, I was well balanced and non-neurotic for the first nine years of my life. I rode a bike with pink tassels on the handlebars, and I wanted to eat peach cobbler for every meal. Then, I had to pull my dad together as the life gushed out of him and all over me, blood and blood and lonely, sarcastic, neurotic Cristina scattered all over the road along with the leaves as the rhythm beneath my hands stopped playing. He was gone, and pretty soon I forgot to ride my bike with the pink tassels on the handlebars. I forgot to ask for peach cobbler when somebody asked me what I wanted. He always told me to think with my heart, but somehow all I could think about was how to use my head to think about hearts and how to stop that rhythm from ever stopping. People said I was sub-human, cold; there was an icicle in my chest, but I never expected anyone to pull it out.

And he is _different_. He is big and tall and damaged, and he meets me on top of vents and looks at me quietly with quiet looks which contain nothing but quiet understanding. He doesn't veil anything and he doesn't hide anything, but he's willing to be taught as well as teach. He thinks I'm beautiful. He tells me I'm beautiful, just so I know. He's a DIY meatballer and the complete anti-Burke, and I know his calm is just as much of a veneer as mine is.

Burke was calm.

Burke _is_ calm.

But without that calm and having to be that hand, _I_ can be a body; we can be two distinct bodies. I can want to ride my bike with the pink tassels on the handlebars, and I can want to want peach cobbler if and when I want it. I can want to know why kissing the anti-Burke feels so much like letting go, ripping off the Band-Aid and pulling out the icicle - why the woman who's falling all over her feet all over again (which is silly and illogical and other silly, illogical things which it would be both silly and illogical to mention) is my father's daughter.

When you stand on top of the vents and the wind is caught between four (sturdy, stainless steel) walls, you feel as if you can fly.

When you stand on top of the vents and your body is caught between two (imperceptibly scarred, surgery worthy) arms, you know you can.


	2. Little Pieces

**Little Pieces**

Modern research supports the view that the blindness of love is not just a figurative matter. A study undertaken in 2004, in fact, conclusively proved that feelings of love actually suppress the activity of the areas of the brain which control critical thought; love, quite literally, makes you blind. It makes you forget what's important, and pretend what isn't is more essential to you than oxygen. It makes day-to-day life stranger than fiction, and it makes you trust your lover more than you trust yourself, which is actually quite dumb.

Dumb people don't make good surgeons.

"I'm glad."

"About what?"

The room is dark, and his voice is soothing against my back although I'm still bristling on the inside.

"That you're getting better, I really am." I blink twice and take stock: my own body, shaking ever so slightly in the breeze that comes from beneath the edge of the duvet and him behind me, touching but not touching - the way we used to touch but not touch. "You're growing, and I'm glad. But before - not The Before, but before - you were careful around me, and cautious. You 'may I'ed me. I've never been 'may I'ed before. Burke didn't 'may I' me, in case you're wondering."

He waits a moment before speaking. "Do you...do you miss that? The 'may I'ing?"

"I don't know."

"Do you miss Burke?"

I want to sit up and slap him. "How is Burke even _remotely _related to 'may I'ing? That's like comparing a duck to a chicken!"

"They're both birds."

I do sit up. And turn on the light. And glare. "Chicken is white meat. Duck is red meat. Burke was a cardio god who brought me a cup of coffee one day and I fell in love with the next. You 'may I'ing me? That was the only perk of you being a mess, and I thought I was a shattered, fractured mess, but then I found you and you being a mess stopped me being so dark and twisty."

"Dark and twisty?"

"It's a Meredith thing."

"I pulled an icicle out of your chest. Did Burke pull an icicle out of your chest?"

"Burke kissed me."

"And you think I'm stupid for comparing Burke and 'may I'ing when you're comparing me saving your life to Burke _kissing_ you?" He's got the crazy man look in his blue, blue eyes. I hate blue eyes; I hate most blue eyes. I do not hate Owen's blue eyes, I have discovered, for the simple reason that they belong to Owen. "And I kissed you too."

"But I love you more than Burke." I jab at the lamp switch, and it falls off the table and breaks. I am annoyed. I am trying very hard to be annoyed.

"You're cold."

"It's nothing."

His arm drapes over me, warm and heavy, and I am suddenly engulfed in something indescribable as he pulls his body flush to mine. "You're cold, and I used to 'may I' you because I didn't know you and I didn't know what you needed."

"And now you do?"

"And now I do."

"Explain."

"Sex. Lots of sex. Tequila. Cardio. Thicker insulation in the walls, both because you get cold easily and because you have a lesbian roommate with an extensive vocabulary. Meredith. More cardio, which is kind of like surgical sex for you. Rubber bands in the pocket of your scrubs for when you forget to wear your hair up. Meredith to agree with you on every choice you make, be it about sex, tequila, cardio or your hair. I know you."

I blink again, but it's a different kind of blink. "No. You don't."

"I don't?"

"No." I close my eyes and let myself relax into that something indescribable which fills the room with a stupid, secret peace and makes me feel all warm and non-dark and twisty. I doubt I'd love him just that little bit more even if he were suffering from something cardiothoracic which had come about from too much work insulating walls and drinking bottles of tequila."I need you."

And those three words rob the breath from my body.

"I just need you."


	3. Precipice

**_Phew. Blinder of a finale. I really can't bring myself to like Teddy, or to make peace with the fact that Owen plays the guitar (and Shepherd plays the guitar, and Burke plays the trumpet - if they all did this, there would have to be some kind of surgical band geek society). I get that McGinger and McDamaged&Blonde went through death and doom and despair and unrequited-but-not-really LURVE for each other, but her face is freakishly thin and he pulled a frickin' icicle out of Cristina's chest. Hello, metaphor? Plus, Teddy is far too nice. You are not nice to the woman the man you love loves. It is impossible. I have tried, and it is impossible.  
Oh, and because Cristina OWNS (me, and therefore what I write helpunderduresshelp).  
Enjoy.  
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**Precipice**

Right now, Derek Shepherd's heart is beating on its own, and I have proved myself to be an incredible cardiothoracic surgeon. I saved a man's life, and I did so under pressure; I am an under fire, battle scarred, well oiled piece of cardio god machinery, and Derek Shepherd is alive to make more babies with Meredith who will all have gravity defying hair and tequila habits. They're going to have that house with the plate glass windows and a Cristina room, and they're probably going to build a white picket fence and rescue a dog. I made myself worthy, I saved a patient – and that is why I wait until Jackson, and stupid sobbing April, and too calm Meredith have gone before I let my knees collapse.

He catches me (of course).

"I've got you."

"You also have a through-and-through to the shoulder, you shouldn't –"

"Shhh."

It's funny to describe the way we're standing now, with me half bent back over his bad arm like something in a cheesy romance novel with lots of porn. But I can't stand, and I can't stand it.

"Let me up, Owen."

He looks at me. He really, truly looks at me. I've always understood what he said and what he meant when he told me I saw him, but until now I've never been a partaker of that experience. Now that the moment's arrived? He sees me. He sees me, and he sees I'm about to fly into a million pieces. And, ever the trauma surgeon, he says one thing:

"Hit me."

"_What_?" I pull myself off him, pull my scrub cap off my head so that I can grab a hank of hair to pull and check I'm not dreaming. "What did you just say?"

"Cristina –"

"Hit you? I mean, we've just been through a major, life-changing experience." My feet are beginning to move of their own accord, up and down, up and down, so I'm pacing the length of the table and not looking at him, looking anywhere but at him because looking at him might just kill me.

"Cristina –"

"Derek almost died. Meredith lost her McBaby. People are dead. And you? You are _stupid_. People who come back into hospitals with shooters inside are _stupid_. You are very, very, very _stupid_ and I –"

"Cristina!" He grips me by the shoulders so hard it hurts, and I am for no reason at all nodding and nodding and nodding, because I just can't seem to stop. I try pacing too, but that doesn't go so well, and we end up in a sort of Owen holding down the crazy funky disco Running Man Cristina who keeps nodding and nodding and nodding like one of those tacky bobble head dolls. "I've been through this," he tells me. "And you're going to need something to hit, and if you hit anything in here, you are most likely going to hurt yourself."

"Oh, what do you care?"

"Here." He grabs one of my clenched fists – nails digging into the palm, stained with tiny flecks of my own blood – and taps himself with it. "That's you, hitting me. I care, and you need to do it."

And I think I do. So I hit him again. This time, though, I go for it. I hit him hard in the chest once, so hard that it makes a sound and ricochets, and then I do again like he's dying and I'm trying desperately to restart his heart. I hit him one more time, and another time, and the dull _thwack_ my fist makes every time it connects is like a dull, vapid, useless heartbeat. To his credit, Owen just stands there and takes it, although he hasn't relaxed his grip on my shoulders. I'm hitting him over and over, and I'm gasping, and suddenly there's no air in the room and my throat is bubbling, bubbling and burning and I launch myself at him with both hands, both sets of nails, slapping and punching and clawing at him, because – because _because_. I have seen people die before, and I have seen people die today, but I am shrieking these terrible half-baked obscenities as I beat on the man I love. He doesn't let go of me, though, when I sag, and when I have to stop hitting him. It reaches a point where I really, really want him to let go of me, and he still doesn't.

This provokes the kicking. The kicking means that he shifts me back a few inches, but continues to remain utterly impassive as I try both to break his tibias and scream until I'm hoarse – because I'm a women, and women are multi-taskers.

There is a little more sagging, and then I begin again. I don't touch his face, of course, because that would entail looking him in the eye, which I obviously can't do due to the whole dying/no air/flying into a million pieces thing. I am aware dimly that he has a gun shot wound to the shoulder, so I try to keep the beating localised to the upper torso (hitting) and the lower legs (kicking), because we wrecked cardio gods are nothing if not methodical. But that train of reasoning has to run out at some point, when I'm too tired to try and do any more damage and I'm just hanging there like a dead weight (I'm not quite sure when he lifted me off the ground; maybe sometime during the kicking, who knows). And then he asks the question.

"How's your sympathetic nervous system?"

I make eye contact. I am that ready to throw down. "If you hug me, I will bite you. I am in no way kidding, you emotionally adulterous brain-fried-by-Desert-Storm bastard – and yes, I know Desert Storm has nothing to do with Iraq, it is just a phrase us normal people use because it is hot in Iraq with lots and lots of desert."

He looks at me. He _sees_ me. God, I'm enough to make myself sick, but I can't let go and cry right now, which I will if there's hugging involved. In a way, he kind of took a bullet for me (bullet taking emotionally adulterous brain-fried-by-Desert-Storm bastard). I retain eye contact, and although I am a least an inch off the floor, I stare him down. "I owe you a good choking," I say, because I'm mean and dying a little on the inside like a black spotted bowel. "And so help me, I will choke you. You are going to put me down and not hug me, because although that works on your scary 'oooh, I love Private Teddy and/or Teddy's privates' brain, it sure as hell doesn't work on mine."

"Finished?"

"Not nearly."

And I think he gets it – the whole dying if we make eye contact, and crying like a girl, not just a person with a vagina (my vagina does not control me). He does not put me down, however. He leaves me hanging in mid-air and turns me to face the room where there is blood on the floor and Derek's blood on the table, and then he interlaces his hands over my sternum and holds me like that. I am off the floor, and I am being held. I do not desire either of these things, but I actually can't bring myself to say this (because on the inside, my sympathetic nervous system is calming down, my pulse is slowing, and my breathing is becoming easier).

And our hearts are beating in tandem.

Even my heart is untrustworthy.

"This is better than letting you go to town." He sounds calm, and it's both irritating and so, so sad. "Because my body is keeping your body in check, and stopping you going insane with grief and rage. I know some of that grief and some of that rage is directed at me, and I deserve that. I know I deserve that, and I know that in layman's terms we're over."

I'm slightly more angry with him for the whole 'we are one spirit' concept, actually. "I am not a newborn, Owen, you do not need to regulate me."

His face is next to mine, and that hurts a little more than a little. I can smell him, I can feel him, and I do not want him to be the one to put me back together, pieces or no pieces. I know that if I turned or gave any indication that I was not silently fighting him, he would put me down and I would cry. But focusing on fighting means that I haven't given up, and that's the most important thing: I know that I belong to no one, and that I am not dead and not taken and still fighting because I have not yet given up.

The only problem is, I'm not sure what I haven't yet given up on.

So we stay there - just like that. We stay there. We stay still, and we stay still and we regulate each other's arterial palpations and respirations and try not to think about each other's thoughts, even if they are the same.


	4. The Heat Is Unacceptable

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_**Owen is fun to character sketch because you end up with two people: Owen, and Owen's saviour complex.  
Enjoy.**_

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The Heat Is Unacceptable

Owen considers the inevitability of choices; we all have to make them, after all. A or B, one or two, yes or no, right or wrong. Although there's no definitive answer to any question ('do you want to live?': 'yes, in theory, but when I'm standing on the edge of a cliff I always get that infinitesimal desire to jump'), there's always a necessity to take half of what life has to offer and reject the other fifty percent, the everlasting hope being that what we've chosen is the only one of the two that could make us happy.

This almost never happens.

Beth began as a fairytale because it was simple and he had more game aged fifteen than most thirty nine year old investment bankers. Rescuing had become second nature by the age of ten, and it was sometimes almost too easy to rescue Beth - from snakes and spiders and branches which tapped on her window and she thought were hardened career criminals. He was too tall for his age and not yet broad, and making Beth's eyelids flutter seemed, at the time, far more important than making the choice between the man he wanted to be and the man he was becoming. There was a cool triumph to saving her and to being 'coupled up', and he relished that for a long time before the man he wanted to be reminded him quietly that there were people more in need of rescuing than she.

He found a different way to be somebody's saviour.

When at last he found her, Teddy was difficult, and he lusted after her in the way that teenage girls lust after movie stars and called it love because he didn't know what else it could be. At first she thought he was a thrill seeker, searching for the high with less regard for his safety than those who jumped off bridges or swam in the Sound. Her eyebrows rose when she found out he wasn't, and she smiled with a smile that he never quite managed to convince himself didn't have something behind it. Everybody knew, of course they did; that nothing and everything was going on between Owen Hunt and Teddy Altman. She became a part of it, though - he had to save her and he couldn't, because somebody should have told him that he needed saving himself.

Saving from himself.

He is _trying_. It is killing him to even consider the possibility of trying, but he is doing it nevertheless. He had let himself play hooky from his responsibilities when he had shown off for the pretty woman who opened the ambulance doors, smiled at her acerbic way of talking and the slant of her brown eyes as she considered him and his possibilities.

And then he was gone.

And now he isn't.

And now, he's trying.

Owen considers the inevitability of choices every time he is around Cristina Yang. She doesn't seem hurt by his self-imposed forgetfulness or flippancy in the way he treats her; she just closes off the part of herself that considered him and his possibilities and eyes him askance when she sits with the woman with the long blonde hair and eats her salad like a surgeon: slowly, methodically. She is willow thin, light on her feet, nimble with her long fingers - she will be a cardio god someday. The streak of darkness in her is compelling, and yet - because he's trying, so very busy trying - he can't allow himself to rescue her, and not that she'd allow it, of course. He shouldn't really think about her the way that he thinks about her, or look her way as often as he does. He shouldn't consider _her_ and_ her _possibilities, because to do so would be dangerous to him; he has a suspicion that she might save him without trying to, without trying too hard at all. Still, he enjoys the long glance sideways she sends him when she thinks he isn't looking, the long slender slope of the back of her neck.

Now he's trying too hard not to touch her, and the heat is unacceptable.


	5. Code Blue

_**Today's jukebox special is 'No Sex for Ben' by The Rapture. Something about that beat makes me want to get up and write fluff (not that writing fluff isn't what I do on autopilot all day anyway – angst just doesn'**__**t seem to be my bag). This is more about the Twisted Sisters, but Cristina does oh so love her revenge...  
Enjoy.**_

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**Code Blue**

Meredith Grey (whose mother would have gone off the rails if she had changed her name, living or dead) tapped her pen against the chart she was absently doodling in the margin of and sporadically hissed at any intern who dared to obscure her eye line. Oh, for the days of dark and twisty Meredith – hell, even for the days of Sunshine Barbie Meredith– for this Meredith was darker, twistier, had an eight month old foetus sitting directly on top of her bladder and was still refusing to go on maternity leave. Every minute or so, she took a practised, junkie-like pull on her carton of apple juice before setting it back down. By this point, it had become common knowledge that if Doctor Grey didn't have her apple juice, heads would roll; usually intern heads. One one occasion, even Doctor Shepherd had been forced to retreat from the wrath of an apple juice-less Meredith, and it had taken some quick thinking on the part of one Lexie Grey to avoid a disaster by swiftly calling a code blue and, when everyone was looking the opposite way, to sneak a fresh carton into her sister's pocket.

Crisis temporarily averted.

Despite the air of foetus fuelled omniscience which, inexorably, seemed to surround her, Meredith was still surprised when the doors she was busy eyeballing opened to reveal not only a happy Cristina Yang (i.e. _not_ clutching a bottle of tequila) but a _smiling_ Cristina Yang. At the sight of her friend's pearly whites, Meredith's dark-'n'-twisty sense began to tingle and she rushed (well, waddled) forward and seized Cristina's arm.

"Why are you _happy_?"

"Pipe down, preggers."

"You're smiling! We don't smile unless our significant others' mothers are present!"

"I'm happy, is that such a crime?"

Meredith's eyes took on the hue of steel and narrowed, and she marched (well, waddled with assistance) Cristina off into a nearby supply closet. Once in among the linens, she took a few moments to practise her Lamaze breathing – because really, the damn thing could pop any day now – and then focused, replacing the pen in her pocket with a stealing aura of menace which made the foetus with the perfect hair shift uncomfortably inside her and kick.

"Why are you happy?" She demanded. "What in the world could have made you _so_ happy that you are actually smiling? Is your mother dead?"

"It's a secret."

"To Hell with your secret!" The baby kicked harder, and Meredith's features adjusted in response to the extent that she appeared to be suffering the malaise known as 'crazy eyes'. "I am Meredith Grey and I am your _person_, and so help me you are going to tell me what has made you happy before I beat the crap out of you."

Cristina sighed, then rolled her eyes emphatically. "Fine. I'm having a baby."

Meredith shook her head. "Not it. Spill."

"It's a girl."

"Nope. You don't mind as long as it has long fingers, making it suitable for a career in cardiothoracic surgery."

"It's a teeny-tiny baby girl, with tiny little hands and teensy little feet –"

The crazy eyes intensified. "I may vomit. Now, are you going to tell me what's _really _made you so happy, or are you going to continue to fake gush about the baby that may rival even mine in messed up-ness, since its mother is closed off emotionally and its father is a former PTSD sufferer who's approximately eight feet tall?"

"Nope. Not telling."

"Fine." Meredith stormed (waddled) from the closet, only to have the apex of her belly bounce off someone she thought she'd never see again. Her eyes widened to more-than-Oriental-splendour size, and she gasped. "Burke? Doctor Burke?"

"Ah, yes." The voice behind her sounded like a cat who had just been allowed to scrub in on a triple bypass piggyback procedure, and Cristina sailed from the closet with a winning smile and a look of triumph on her face, both of which, in Meredith's estimation, probably eclipsed even the smile and look whichever one it was who had killed General Custer had upon killing General Custer. "Doctor Burke, so nice to see you'll be scrubbing in with us today – me and my husband, that is." Her hand extended, and both wedding and engagement rings flashed. "I'm sure you remember me: Cristina Yang-Hunt."

Inside her belly, Meredith's son (who would be named John George Shepherd, his first name for Derek's father) gave a sleepy smile and settled down for a good nap. Inside Cristina, a very small bean-shaped creature (currently known as It, The Baby and Oh My God) decided that perhaps now wasn't the time to ask the famed Doctor Burke for pointers on her whip stitch technique after all.


	6. We Light Up Like Dynamite

**_Oh, for the early days of C/O, when Owen used to spend his time making intense faces while Cristina ran for the hills or moaned to Meredith about how much he hated her and/or had randomly kissed her after pulling an icicle out of her chest. In homage, here's some fluff. It's actually vaguely amusing, which is odd for these two sad sacks.  
Enjoy._**

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**We Light Up Like Dynamite  
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She's sitting beneath the OR board when he finds her, knees drawn up to her chin, hair flopping in a haphazard dark halo around her head (not that he's much of a sentimentalist, but there really is no other way to describe it). He's aware - almost uncomfortably so - that he's on dangerous ground around her, thin ice that is liable to crack under the weight of any more than the burden it already bears. At the same time, there's a glass ceiling to breach; mentor and student doesn't exactly smack of equality, or the chance of any understanding better than that. Still, though why exactly he does it is still unclear (and yet perfectly cogent in one particular part of the brain), he folds up his legs and sits down beside her, waiting for the moment of silent appreciation to pass so that confession and absolution may begin.

"I lost a patient today," she says finally, looking straight ahead and speaking in the low, measured tone he's come to expect. "That's three already this week, and not one even terminal." A pause, and a slight inspection of her small hands with their neatly pointed nails. "I'm worried that I'm losing my edge - or at least ill."

He gives a slight smile which is invisible from her vantage point, recognising like an old friend the surgical preference for a physical problem which can be fixed instead of a mental one that can't. She and he are different breeds, and that he can appreciate: the broken longing to be whole and the whole would would prefer being broken.

"What happened today?"

"An arterial wall blew, and I tried to plug it with my hand but the tissue was fried." She sighs. "Like trying to dam a tidal wave."

"And the others?"

"Stroked out on the table and sepsis."

He leans his head back against the wall and watches a nurse pass by, chart in one hand and marker in the other. "Have you considered that it could be because you're pushing yourself? Because you're attempting higher risk surgeries in order to be a better doctor?"

She snorts in almost tactful derision, then turns almond shaped eyes on him with an artless, challenging look. "Why are _you_ giving me the get back on the horse speech? What's your interest?"

He shrugs. "I'm your teacher."

She regards him coolly for a moment. "No. Everything I do is methodical and painstaking, and everything you do is quick and instinctual." It doesn't come out sounding like an insult, more a quiet assessment of what it is he does and what she makes of it. There's a workaday pale blue scrub cap in her lap that he hasn't noticed before, and now she picks it up and turns it over in her hands as she continues to study him.

"Do you like me?"

"I think you're a good surgeon."

"That wasn't the question."

"Do I like you?"

"Do you _like_ me like me?"

"What are you, twelve?"

"Look me in the eye and tell me you don't find me attractive."

As amused as he is by the immature line of questioning, he takes a moment to do a little studying of his own. Of course she's not traditionally beautiful and obviously about as sweet as vitriol, but charming? Intriguing? Deep, on some bizarre level which encompasses sarcasm as the highest form of wit? He's used to making snap judgements about people because that's what you have to do in the field, but that doesn't seem to negate the desire to get to know her very much at all.

They both realise he's waited too long.

"I knew it."

"I don't _like_ you like you - I admire your determination."

"Because you like me."

"You're stubborn."

"You're procrastinating."

"To the point of pigheadedness."

"And insulting."

"Dr. Yang," he says firmly (firmer than he feels). "Perhaps you should stop worrying about whether or not I like you and instead focus on a more important task: trying to get on to my service."

"I like you too," she offers. "I mean, you did take out my icicle."

"Good."

"Good."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Okay."

"Great."

He's halfway down the corridor when he hears her call his name, and when he turns she's framed between a towering stack of fresh bedpans and a gurney, complete with sleeping resident.

"Thank you," she says, before poking the resident awake and going on her way without another word.

_Glass ceiling_, he tells himself. _Glass ceiling._


End file.
